A complaint about an article in the Birmingham Mail has been rejected by the Press Complaints Commission, which ruled that the paper had done enough to try to remedy the situation.

Govenors at a local school complained that an article headlined ‘Killed by Bullies’, which contained claims that a girl had committed sucide after being bullied, had failed to distinguish fact from conjecture.

The governors said the claims, made by the girl’s mother, were unfounded, and that an inquest a year later had concluded that there was no evidence that bullying had led to the girl’s suicide.

The Mail disputed that its article had been misleading, but in a bid to resolve the complaint offered to send a reporter to the school to compile a positive feature about how the school community had moved forward since the tragedy.

The offer was rejected, but the PCC said that the offer – and two follow-up articles that the paper had published – was sufficient.

The press watchdog said that if the headline and the opening paragraph of the first article had been taken in isolation they might reasonably have been considered to be misleading in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code of Practice, but the overall article was not.

It said that, as a whole, the article had made it clear that it was based on an interview with the girl’s mother, and it had not suggested that this was a final or formal verdict on the reasons for the girl’s suicide.

It also acknowledged that the article had been part of a series about the incident, and the the Mail had also run a statement from the school saying that it had found no evidence of bullying, as well as details of the inquest verdict, which found bullying was not a factor.

The PCC said: “It is usual for developments to arise in news stories which put previous coverage into context, and it is, by extension, not realistic to expect newspapers to be in possession of all the facts concerning an incident before they can publish information or comments about it.

“In this case, the coverage of the inquest in the paper helped to establish in the public domain the fact that there was another, formal, view of the background to the suicide which did not attach importance to the allegations of bullying.”

It added: “Although the Commission noted the bad feeling that appeared to have arisen between the parties over this matter – something it regretted – the editor’s offer to publish a follow-up piece seemed to have been made in good faith and would have provided a worthwhile opportunity for the school to put its position on the record and for the coroner’s findings to be reiterated.”